Valued at Up To $22.5 million, Program Includes Ground System Engineering Support to Ensure High-Quality Data

Greenbelt, MD -- Global Science & Technology, Inc. (GST) is proud to announce the company has been awarded a task order to provide technical and engineering services in support of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). The task order has a maximum ordering value up to$22.584 million over a five-year period of performance under the NOAA Scientific and Technical Support Services Next Generation Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (Sci-Tech NG IDIQ) contract. The Sci-Tech NG IDIQ is NOAA’s largest scientific and technical support services contract designed to be used throughout the agency.

JPSS is our Nation’s next generation polar-orbiting operational environmental satellite system. JPSS is implemented by NOAA through a partnership with NASA. This interagency effort is the latest generation of U.S. polar-orbiting environmental satellites. JPSS will provide continuity of critical, global Earth observations— including our atmosphere, oceans, clouds, ozone, snow, ice, and vegetation. NOAA, an agency within the Department of Commerce (DOC), works in partnership with NASA on JPSS, ensuring an unbroken series of global weather data and increased accurate weather prediction— securing a more ‘Weather Ready Nation.’

The global environmental data from JPSS will be fed into Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models for forecasts and for a variety of other environmental monitoring and forecasting needs. . In fact, the primary user of JPSS data is NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). Once the polar-orbiting data is retrieved from the JPSS satellites, it is entered into NWP models that are utilized by NOAA’s NWS to better predict medium and long-term weather, including severe weather phenomena. For example, during the early stages of Super storm Sandy in October 2012, the polar-orbiting satellite data helped NOAA’s NWS forecasters and scientists accurately predict Sandy's hurricane track and infamous ‘left hook’ landfall into New York and New Jersey—more than five days in advance.

“GST will perform technical and engineering services in support of the JPSS Calibration and Validation plan,” said GST President Chieh-san Cheng. “Essentially, our work will include the engineering and technical support associated with checking out the spacecraft and testing its instruments after launch. “This period of testing is referred to as calibration and validation, also known as ‘Cal/Val.’” The Cal/Val effort is led by NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research.

The maintenance of the instruments and the associated environmental data products will stretch almost the entire lifetime of the spacecraft and will involve multiple levels of testing and review from specialists across the entire remote sensing community. This methodical review will ensure that scientists, meteorologists and other specialists continue to have calibrated data from the JPSS satellites from as soon as possible after launch through retirement.

The work GST will perform in support of the NOAA JPSS Cal/Val task include of data engineering, data quality support, software development, and analysis.

Headquartered in Greenbelt, Maryland, Global Science & Technology, Inc. (GST) also has offices in: Arlington, Virginia; Fairmont, West Virginia; Asheville, North Carolina; and Boulder, Colorado. GST has built a highly specialized workforce that includes experts in key domains of engineering, science, and information technology. GST provides all levels of scientific and technical expertise and support within the federal Research and Development (R&D) laboratory environment. GST’s major clients include NOAA, National Weather Service (NWS), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and NASA Headquarters. Much of GST’s work has been in direct support of NASA and NOAA science missions and related data systems.